Ves Yogonskaya

Ves Yogonskaya lay on the Mologa River, where a village of that name was recorded in a grant by Grand Prince Ivan to the Simonov Monastery in 1462–1463. From the sixteenth century it was a trading center where salt, wax, hops, honey, fish, cloth and furs changed hands. Contemporary foreign accounts describe merchants from Germany, Italy, Greece and Persia trading here, and customs dues brought income to the treasury.

The settlement gained town status in 1776 and became the center of an uyezd in 1778. Its coat of arms, granted in 1780, bore a black crayfish on a gold field. The uyezd was abolished in 1796 when the town entered Tver Governorate, but was restored in 1803. River traffic later connected the town to the Tikhvin water system between the Volga and the Baltic.